- A New 4K Restoration of Hammer’s Dracula Coming to Theaters and Blu-ray in October 2026
- Uncensored and with new images that are believed to be lost forever
- Made from ‘the best original archival materials from around the world’
Here’s a story to sink your teeth into: Hammer Films has “painstakingly restored” (pun intended, I guess) the 1958 original. Draculaadding “long-lost” footage and delivering an uncensored cut in full 4K. It will hit theaters and home entertainment in October 2026.
This is not a remaster. It is a resurrection. It features footage thought lost for more than six decades and only seen by Japanese moviegoers in the 1950s. The recovered material comes “from the best original archival materials from around the world” and has never been released in the US or the UK, nor is it available for home viewing in either country.
Dracula was the second on-screen pairing of Peter Cushing, who plays Dr. Van Helsing, and Christopher Lee, who plays… I’m just going over my notes here… Dracula.
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Fangs for memories
There have been many Dracula films, but the 1958 film delivered the definitive Drac: as Hammer Films says, Lee’s performance introduced “the bloodshot eyes, predatory fangs and visceral physicality that became the template for modern vampire mythology and whose influence can still be seen in horror cinema today.”
It’s hard to exaggerate DraculaThe influence of Everything You’d Expect from a Dracula Movie (the fangs, the heaving breasts, the wooden stakes, the suggestion that some women might enjoy having their necks bitten by a charismatic count) appears here, and the film has frequently been included in rankings of the best horror movies and films of all time.
As director Terence Fisher explained to our friends at SFX Magazine, this was the movie that made vampires sexy. “My greatest contribution to the Dracula myth was to highlight the underlying sexual element in the story… The moment he bites is the culmination of a sexual experience.”
As you can see from the still images above, the restored version looks absolutely spectacular. And the film itself is a masterpiece. As Empire wrote in its retrospective review: “It was loud, sexy and never afraid to be gory. And with its spectacular finale, in which the Count’s flesh falls off and turns to dust as he is caught in the first rays of the morning sun, Dracula created one of the classic images of horror cinema.”
According to John Gore, CEO of Hammer Films and CEO of the wonderfully named John Gore Studios, “returning Dracula to audiences in 4K goes far beyond film restoration work. It’s about recovering a part of British film history that audiences believed was lost forever. Seeing Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing together again in such extraordinary detail is a reminder of how powerful this film remains almost seventy years after its original release.”
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